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Environmentalists believe that people cause climate change, so maybe this is just punishment (environmental justice) in their never-ending and destructive quest for sustainability. “Hotter, drier, longer forest fires we are witnessing today have nothing to do with ‘dangerous manmade climate change. They have a lot to do with idiotic forest mismanagement policies and practices.”—Paul Driessen, Senior Policy Advisor, CFACT This past week, the New York Times reported on California’s wildfires stating that “Since 2012, according to state emergency management officials, there has not been a month without a wildfire burning—a stark contrast to previous decades, when fire officials saw the...

Sanity: Without question, President Obama and his administration were the biggest enemies of the fossil fuel industry in the history of our country. Never mind that fossil fuels (along with innovation) were responsible for transforming the United States into the world’s leading economic power. Obama was dead-set on destroying the industry in lieu of some ‘clean energy’ nirvana that is decades away from reality, given the pace of technological development in that industry.

Late last summer, and with great fanfare, Xcel Energy announced its proposal to close the Comanche I & II power units in Pueblo a decade ahead of schedule. They offered as replacement the euphemistically titled “Colorado Energy Plan” , a massive $2.5 billion fuel-switching scheme to move its Colorado customers away from baseload, reliable hydrocarbons in favor of intermittent renewables. ... the Minneapolis-based monopoly utility will force captive ratepayers to cough up at least another $287 million. That’s on top of the modeling errors we already found in their accounting, and Xcel acknowledged. In other words, ratepayers will pay higher...

EUROPE is braced for its hottest day since records began today with temperatures likely to soar above the 118F high set 40 years ago. Thousands of Brit holidaymakers and expats in Spain and Portugal will pile on to packed beaches as the heatwave peaks. The blistering sunshine is widely tipped to pass the 118.4F (48C) recorded in Athens, Greece, on July 10, 1977. And the deadly scorcher — driven by an African plume carrying Saharan dust with it — will spark a mini-revival of Britain’s heatwave with temperatures of 88F (31C) expected all weekend. But it could also lead to...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has closed an investigation into oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. without taking any action. The probe was opened in 2016 to examine how Exxon Mobil accounts for its oil and natural gas reserves and factors the costs of climate change into its operations, including whether it is truthful enough with shareholders about the financial risks of climate change and climate policies. Exxon Mobil provided a letter from the SEC Friday saying that the investigation had been closed with no action, but that such a notification was not an exoneration. The SEC doesn’t comment publicly...

Much of the heat that’s gripped California and hastened the spread of deadly wildfires recently is due to a strange but familiar shift in the jet stream — one that’s haunted the West with threatening fire conditions in the past and could cause more hot, dry spells in the future, especially with a changing climate. The jet stream, the river of wind high above the Northern Hemisphere, has been weaker and wavier in the past few weeks, scientists say. Instead of pushing weather systems along as it usually does, it’s allowing the patterns to stagnate. “We’re seeing this mix of...

The New York Times Magazine has done something unprecedented. On Wednesday, it released an entire issue containing just one article on the subject of global warming. “Losing Earth,” by Nathaniel Rich, chronicles the ten-year period from 1979 to 1989 in which scientists reached consensus about human-caused climate change, and politicians nearly came to a global-scale solution. Informed by more than 100 interviews and 18 months of reporting, the piece twists and turns around a zany cast of characters who bravely risked their careers to solve the climate crisis. There’s no spoiler alert needed for the ending: They failed. But it’s...

Citing safety, the Trump administration on Thursday proposed rolling back car-mileage standards, backing away from years of government efforts to cut Americans’ trips to the gas station and reduce unhealthy, climate-changing tailpipe emissions. If the proposed rule becomes final, it could roil the auto industry as it prepares for new model years and weaken one of the federal government’s chief weapons against climate change — regulating emissions from cars and other vehicles. The result, opponents say, will be dirtier air and more pollution-related illness and death. The proposal itself estimates it could cost tens of thousands of jobs — auto...

California Gov. Jerry Brown says his state is in "uncharted territory" with the current slew of intense wildfires and he warns that climate change has made the situation "part of our ordinary experience." "[The] predictions that I see, the more serious predictions of warming and fires to occur later in the century, 2040 or 2050, they're now occurring in real time," Brown said at a news conference on Wednesday in Sacramento. "You can expect that — unfortunately — to continue intensifying in California and throughout the Southwest. We are part of that process," he said. Brown said that only a...

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences. Compared with string theory and genetic engineering, the “greenhouse effect” — a metaphor dating to the early 1900s — was ancient history, described in any Introduction to Biology textbook. Nor...

Humans have used up more of Earth’s resources than it can regenerate within one year as of Aug. 1, 2018, according to the Global Footprint Network. This year's Earth Overshoot Day is the earliest ever. Last year’s Earth Overshoot Day fell on Aug. 2. The date, which was previously known as Ecological Debt Day, has occurred steadily earlier since 1971. That year, the date fell on Dec. 21. “We are using 1.7 Earths,” according to the Global Footprint Network’s website. “We use more ecological resources and services than nature can regenerate through overfishing, overharvesting forests and emitting more carbon dioxide...

MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes’ admission that climate change is a “ratings killer” has infuriated environmentalists who accused the liberal network of being more concerned about its bottom line than with fighting global warming. Asked about his network’s lack of climate-change coverage, Mr. Hayes tweeted Tuesday that “almost without exception. every single time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer. so incentives are not great.” His frank assessment was met with chuckles from climate skeptics like Anthony Watts, who called it “hilarious, but true,” given that global warming typically brings up the rear on polls and surveys of top voter...

In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer. This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet. Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed...

Remember that video of an emaciated Baffin Island polar bear that went viral last December? It became the poster bear for climate change. National Geographic made a stunning admission - it was a bit bogus. The Statement: National Geographic went too far in drawing a definitive connection between climate change and a particular starving polar bear in the opening caption of our video about the animal. We said, "This is what climate change looks like." While science has established that there is a strong connection between melting sea ice and polar bears dying off, there is no way to know...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appearing on Trevor Noah’s show Thursday night, advocated for a “moral and ethical economy” that provides free health care, free college education, and “bold action on climate change” for the American people. “We’re here to talk about wages; we’re here to talk about education; we’re here to talk about saving our planet; we’re here to talk about a carbon tax; we’re here to talk about people paying their fair share, and we’re here to talk about saving the country, frankly,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “How do you pay for these?” Noah asked the 28-year-old who defeated Rep. Joe Crowley, a...

Rising seas, vanishing water resources, expanded deserts and disappearing species all have been blamed on global warming. Now it’s to blame for more suicides, says a new report. The Guardian of London reported a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found warming could be as significant a cause as economic recessions, “which are known to increase self-harm.” “The links between mental health and global warming have not been widely researched but the new work analyzed temperature and suicides across the U.S. and Mexico in recent decades. It found that the rate of suicide rose by 0.7 percent in...

It is a slam-dunk certainty that American mainstream media will seize upon a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, “Southern California sets all-time heat records amid broiling conditions,” as justification for its continuing support of the contested theory of man-caused global warming. It has already happened with a Yahoo News story claiming that the new temperature records world-wide prove man causes climate change.But there are problems in pursuing that path.First, days that reach and exceed 117-degree temperatures have been known to happen for a very long time in the interior basin of southern California, sometimes referred to as “Death...

According to a survey published by Gallup, there are 36 economic and non-economic issues on the minds of Americans. No one mentioned climate change. As you might expect, economic issues were in the forefront of the voters' minds. But there are some interesting results nonetheless:

The bestselling computer game of 2018 is called Far Cry 5. It features a militant doomsday cult that takes over parts of America and tries to forcibly convince everyone that the world is about to end. That could never happen for real in America, could it? In a related story, a group of mostly teenage girls have formed a group with the doomsday-ish name "Zero Hour" because of their conviction that global warming is soon to destroy the world. Do you think it's too much to compare them to the militants in Far Cry 5? Here's a quote from their...

As one climate lawsuit gets thrown out of court in New York, another one takes its place in Baltimore. Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh announced the lawsuit Friday in joining about a dozen other cities and states in suing fossil fuel firms for their role in causing global warming.